


the one where they're married

by Adrieunor



Category: The Good Place (TV)
Genre: Amnesia, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, F/M, Fake/Pretend Relationship, Marriage, Sort Of, this is the test
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-28
Updated: 2020-12-28
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:48:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28379520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Adrieunor/pseuds/Adrieunor
Summary: It didn’t quite top the discovery of waking up in a hospital bed with potential brain damage, but Eleanor is quite sure of one thing. She’s willing to stake money on it, no matter how out of character or divergent he is from her history:this man is her husband.Which,great– wow, whoa and every other questionable w-sound.Hadn’t thought you had it in you girl, Eleanor thinks.
Relationships: Michael (The Good Place) & Eleanor Shellstrop, Michael (The Good Place)/Eleanor Shellstrop
Comments: 5
Kudos: 22





	the one where they're married

Eleanor wakes up.

Correction: Eleanor _tries_.

One moment, it’s the _nothingness_ of unconsciousness and then the sudden clarity of _what’s happening? Where am I?_ — except her body feels like it hasn’t caught up to this decision.

She feels heavy.

 _All_ of her feels heavy. From the bottom of her feet to the crown of her head, it feels like every atom of her person has suddenly gained ten extra ounces of new weight. Not enough to be a hardship, individually, but combined together—she’s _drowning_ , suffocated by her own eyelids and the thick, still air that doesn’t give any hint to where she seems to be.

Her _eyes_ feel heavy – the stupid gelatinous orbs feel like they’re suspended in concrete, while her lids struggle to flutter awake.

(It’s a _stupid_ expression, anyway, because it’s more hippos doing ballet than graceful ostriches with large feathered fans prancing across the imaginary stage of her mind.)

 _Fuck_.

It hurts.

It feels good to be able to give a resounding f-bomb in her mind. She doesn’t know _why_ it feels good, just that it does—it shouldn’t, though, since Eleanor has been saying fuck and other double-dog-dare-you words since she was in secondhand velcro shoes. She says “fuck” more times on the daily than her own name, certainly more times than “please” or “thank you.”

Ten seconds of consciousness has her registering how rattled her bones feel. Someone has either taken her brain and expanded it to be too big for her skull, or taken her skull and fractured it, hot gluing the pieces back to fit her brain but accidentally leaving a few behind.

“Eleanor? Are you awake?”

 _Trying to be_.

Even in her mind, the words she wants to respond with feel slurred, fumbled by a dull tongue that’s trying to unstick from the roof of her mouth.

She’s not sure if the keening sound is just bubbling frustration and pain she’s creating in her head, or if she’s really making it. Eleanor wants to open her mouth and let her sad, animal crying out, but it seems, between the last time she was awake and now, someone’s affixed her jaw with lead, super glue, and the caramel they use to cover those cheap, green apple pops.

Eleanor settles for a whimper.

It’s the trembling of her bottom lip that makes her realize something’s brushing against her face, threaded across her nose and mouth and affixed by sticky tape on her cheeks.

Dry fingertips, warm and calloused, brush over her temple. The stray, lanky hair that had been plastered to her forehead, tickling her brow and her nose, is brushed back and tucked behind her ears.

“Hold on,” the same person says, and something clicks or beeps beside her ear. She hadn’t thought of her wrists and hands yet, had only registered them being as weighed down as the rest of her. Now, she’s minutely aware of the tender clasp around her left wrist – a dry, warm steadiness that makes her joints ache painfully.

Eleanor wants to wiggle, wants to shake, wants to fucking _jerk_ her arms and legs about until everything _pops_ back into feeling, but she _can’t_. Something from inside must be conveyed outside, some twitch or snarl of frustration, because the warm hand gently turns her wrist. Unfamiliar (familiar) fingers slide and brush against her pulse before settling into a new position: her own hand cradled in a larger one, while a thumb that’s not hers gently strokes the tops of her knuckles.

The next sound feels like a land mine detonated in a pocket of silence. A heavy door opens with the force of five hundred hangovers, followed by heels clicking sharply and smartly against a linoleum floor. Rustling fabric, a pen clicking, a folder being dropped down onto a table surface all has her wincing, as if it’s been amplified _right by her fucking ear_.

Her companion does not let go of her hand, but he grips it until his thumb is a firm, anxious pressure that presses on the space between her ring finger and pinky.

“Is she in pain? She looks—“

Eleanor doesn’t catch the rest of it, but the voice has only picked up in volume, a little, harried but direct. Whatever answer the new body has, she doesn't hear it. 

Amidst the skull-splitting pain that pulsates from her crown down to the rest of her, like a tree suddenly struck by lighting, she registers only one thing: a dry press of lips against her fingers, solemn and unbearably present sensation, before she’s swarmed by other voices and sounds.

* * *

Eleanor is only catching every fifth word that is coming out of the woman’s mouth. The ice chips had alleviated the fuzziness on her tongue, but it hadn’t fixed what was wrong in her head.

Her head.

Words like _damage_ , _injury, sustained bleeding_ ,

The wailing in her ears had subsided, a bit, since the last time she was awake. It was now a low, thrumming pitch in the back of her mind, like a loud fluorescent light bulb in an office space. She can ignore it, after a while, but it’s _there_.

Other things that are very much _there_ and present: the man.

* * *

Her eyes drift towards his hand, the one that’s not holding her own – long fingers woven loosely to catch her own, between the gauze and IV line – where it rests on his knee. She's not sure what the glimmer is, at first, until she realizes it's two gold bands on one hand, a comically smaller one slipped onto his pinky. 

“Ah,” her eyes drift back up of their own accord to watch the way his brows furrow, mouth open in thought, “I thought it’d be better if I kept it, in case the tests and the machines…”

His mouth purses into a thin line, which only emphasizes the ones carved into the corners of his mouth and his eyes even more – he looks like the type that would frown a lot, Eleanor thinks. He seemed like the bookish-type that would have resting bitch face while deep in thought; a heavy oak desk with a tiffany lamp and a pen tipped in gold wouldn’t be out of place in a room with him, or a really fancy fucking wall of degrees and a sharp suit.

Her shameless eyes stray towards his thin lips, the defined line of his jaw, skipping back to the worn crinkles in his skin.

There’s a lot of _something_ to him that seems to command the presence of whatever space he occupies. The corner he occupies wraps around him like a well-tailored jacket – even in his unassuming navy and pale blue.

 _Well,_ she revises her thoughts; he looked like he might laugh a lot, too. Eleanor bets he laughs with his mouth wide open, or smiles to show nearly all his teeth.

He wasn’t laughing now, of course. Given the circumstances.

* * *

He is a man-shaped absence in her memory – she of the forgetful faces and even more forgetful names has seemingly forgotten her own husband, spouse, and partner-- legally bound tax accomplice, all of the above. Michael.

He’s got a face made for

He does a funny

 _Oh_.

It didn’t quite top the discovery of waking up in a hospital bed with potential brain damage, but Eleanor is quite sure of one thing. She’s willing to stake money on it, no matter how out of character or divergent he is from her history:

this man is her husband.

Which, _great_ – wow, whoa and every other questionable w-sound.

Hadn’t thought you had it in you girl, Eleanor thinks. She takes another second, ten, fifteen, a minute, to look appreciatively up and down.

* * *

She’s not sure if the muscles in her face contort into the expression of surprise like the light bulb that’s gone off in her head – her jaw is still a little slack and her eyes are slow to blink. He might not have noticed, in between one second and the next, how utterly thrown off she is.

* * *

It doesn’t _look_ like a fake; Eleanor has seen a _lot_ of fake gold jewelry in her time to know the difference. It’s beautiful in the way that all the ostentatious rings she would pick for herself would not be. She keeps turning her hand this way and that, until one of the nurses asks if she's having wrist pain. 

Despite protests, a tall nurse with too much arm hair pushes her in a wheelchair towards the curb where a burgundy crossover idles.

“Hopefully we won’t see you too soon,” Gary, Gerry, Gerald – or whatever – his name is, says cheerfully. She squints up at him, and he falters. Eleanor supposes that one good thing about being brain damaged was she now had a _legitimate_ reason to forget people’s names.

* * *

The good news: if she _had_ woken up too brain damaged to remember her own name, Michael would have fixed that problem easily—it would have been two minutes, tops. She’s pretty sure he says her name more than he uses any other noun or pronoun.

(Which, by the way, the fact that she still has a basic grasp of grammar makes her, again, want to keep track for curiosity’s sake what her loopy brain has decided to keep and discard. She’d stared at the red plastic dome on her hospital plate before, after a pronounced beat, Michael had reached across and pulled the foil top off of her gelatin.)

* * *

It just _sounds_ funny – something in her brain itches like a scab underneath a cast, present but unreachable. The _way_ he says her name. It’s been her name for over three decades, so she knows what _Eleanor_ sounds like, usually, coming out of other people’s mouths (when they’re coming, even!). Even knows what it sounds like sung in different accents, thanks to that fucking song.

( _All the lonely people, where do they all belong?_

Fuck. Her brain couldn’t have erased _that_?)

* * *

It’s not the porch that surprises her; it’s the honest-to-god porch swing, pale wicker and decorated with springtime cushions. That throws her for a loop; breaks a little part of her brain that isn’t already struggling to function.

(“This…. This broke me.”)

(Something tickles her brain, there, too, but it’s gone.)

It’s a good porch, too. The kind that doesn’t fully wrap around the house, but gives enough room for someone to day drink and – ah, there it is, the little tea table that would be beside the—the ___________. She grasps for the word, shapeless and vague. It’s blurry in her head, the _thing_ she’s thinking about also blurry and distant. Her mouth puckers in a frown.

Michael rolls the car to a commercial perfect stop. Eleanor still jerks in her seat. He unbuckles his seat belt and bounds around to her side, opening the door before she’s even lifted a hand to pop it.

“Here, let me-“

She wonders how often she’s let him do anything, in contrast to allowing him to – her hand moves to rest on the release of the seat belt, staking territory.

Her stomach does one, two, slow flops – a fat pancake turned by an amateur line cook.

* * *

She doesn’t need an entire love story’s memory to make an easy conclusion, not when Michael’s eyes sweep across her face with a slow, longing softness while his mouth twitches, again, as if it has something to say he won’t let it:

Michael is _in love_ with her.

Eleanor thinks this should be a good thing, if they’re married, but the conclusion settles uncomfortably on top of her chest – it doesn’t sink in, doesn’t settle into a slot of rightness, and she ignores the feeling of disappointment.

Stupid of her, honestly, to think this observation was all it would take to remember _why_ Michael is in love with her. Or _how_ Michael is in love with her.

( _What_ Michael is in love with.)

* * *

They have a cat. She doesn’t know why this is something that trips her up, but it does. She’d nearly tripped up _on_ it, literally, when the thing had slunk up to rub itself against her legs, making figure eights around her legs and Michael’s. Michael had nearly stepped on its tail, foot stopping just before contact as if compelled by muscle memory or a glitch in the system.

“Oh,” he hisses, fumbling with the duffel bag, complementary hospital pillow (the socks she’d decided to “wear out” as she’d joked at the nurse, wiping drool from the corner of her mouth), and reusable water bottles, in his arms, “Vicky, stop.”

“Vicky?”

She hopes she hadn't been the one to name it. Vicky _sounds_ like a bitchy girl name, and in Eleanor Shellstrop's book of past experiences she could confirm this. Twice.

Michael gives up on trying to carry everything into … _wherever_ , instead dumping his load onto the love seat in an adjourning room.

Her fingers trail along the table in the entryway, eyes flickering up to give the large, round mirror at eye-level a glance before she’s turning away. She’s pale as a ghost in this strange grey-blue home.

There’s a kitchen island with real, actual stools that swivel _plus_ a wooden dining table with upholstered chairs. She wants to hiss at how excessive it is – eating a bowl of cereal over a dirty sink was enough for her for years – but she bites her tongue. A voice in the back of her head asks if maybe she had picked some of these, had selected them herself. You don’t build a home for two from only one person’s purchases.

“What would you like first, Eleanor?” His expression is hopefulness strained through a sieve. He doesn’t seem to realize how he leans towards her, curves his entire, tall being to look down at her. “Anything you want, just- just let me know. If you’re hungry, I could fix us a snack before you’re due for your next round of meds.”

It should feel annoying and towering, claustrophobic, but instead, looking upwards at him, she feels watched. Seen. It’s an uncomfortable feeling for someone who has _always_ depended on being able to grift just under the radar, but it also isn’t _unpleasant_.

His hands are pressed together, fingertips touching, long and lean, like prayer.

“Can I just lay down for a bit?”

Michael’s expression softens. “Of course, Eleanor.”

And he offers his hand, palm upturned, as if the hallway was some long, arduous passage instead of a short walk towards a few doors or a climb up the stairs. Eleanor’s hands are so small in his, but his fingers wrap around hers like old acquaintances—hers have forgotten the intricacies of where to go, his have not forgotten her shape and his thumb brushes, familiar, across her knuckles like hello.

It is a warm and dry hold, and what Eleanor has managed to scrape, glean, and covertly steal in her observations about Michael all lead to the conclusion that this is a good descriptor, the most basic, for Michael himself: warm and dry, like Arizona, but the postcard worthy-parts, not the dumpster fire, trash-bag parts that made her.

At the foot of the stairs he pauses, one hand on the rail, the other holding her hand lifted in the air like a debutante. Something flickers, for a moment, and Eleanor imagines a tall, dark woman in a gown and evening gloves, of all things, poised at the foot of the stairs as if to give a toast. She blinks and the image is gone.

“You know,” Michael says, looking up. His brows furrow. “Maybe we should use the guest room downstairs instead. Avoid the stairs.”

“No,” she says, surprising herself. “I want my room.”

* * *

She gives the pillow a sniff, leaning down until her nose brushes against the cotton.

 _Yeah_. That’s her. It smells like the scent of her hair, a little to the left of unwashed and greasy. Faint, but there.

There’s stray, blonde strands of hair that curl, pale and almost invisible, in the space where the pillow had been just before—like sunny, thin worms caught only in a certain slant of light.

Eleanor _is_ playing excavation isn’t she? She is rooting around, examining and putting together all these clues left behind for a relationship, a love; building some semblance of understanding for the ghost of a woman—is she an anthropologist? Or is this a forensic-type investigation?

Is Eleanor Shellstrop dead?

She’s here but not here—the pictures and the gold band around her finger tell her these are her memories but they’re _not_. Her dumb lizard brain hasn’t ______ it out yet.

Oh. Another word that’s fallen through her fingers before she’s even remembered it.

It feels wrong to roll around, smell, and sleep in someone else’s marriage bed—it’s not the first time she’s done it, but it’s never been _her_ bed.

What other intimacies can she find just sitting in the small-person-shaped dip of this bed? She doesn’t think about the dead flakes or skin, but she breaths deeply and her body nearly lurches into that place between awake and sleep—the familiar smell of _bed_ that can only belong to ones own so strong.

The pillows on this side are fat and soft, just the way she likes them. She knows her head would sink into an orgy of clouds if she were to flop down now. It is _tempting_ to do exactly what she had told Michael she wanted to do.

Eleanor resists—there’s another side to explore, still.

* * *

It is during one of these days, where she rolls around on the bed (their bed) like a dog left unsupervised in an empty home, that a thought strikes her. It strikes her so suddenly and with a force that she has to press the palm of her hand to her temple, eyes wincing—

Dummy.

What’s under the bed?

She’d been thorough examining the faint layers of dust coating boxes and folds of laundry on the higher shelves, where someone like Michael would keep his things, that she hadn’t thought to drop below to see where someone like her—past Eleanor, GSTGSD-Eleanor, might have hidden and holed away her own treasure.

The only thing she finds, disappointingly, is a shoe caddy with shoes as big as her head, some dust bunnies, and a laptop still charging. 

* * *

Vicky the cat goes downstairs into the basement on a daily basis, almost always for half an hour to one, and cries for attention. It’s a bizarre, attention-seeking, and almost resentful performance and, despite being dead ass annoying, Eleanor can relate. What a mood, right?

* * *

Forgotten your password? She clicks it.

The prompt doesn’t help at all: _you know it, bitch!!_

What? Why would she do that to herself? Except, that is _so_ on brand for her and Eleanor hates, hates, hates Eleanor (herself) and loves Eleanor (herself) and hates Eleanor (herself).

She scowls, flexing her fingers. Vicky takes this opportunity to leap into her lap, tail high and crooked for attention, with her unabashed asshole right in Eleanor’s face.

 _fuckyou!_ She types, exasperated; before clicking enter, she scowls and adds an extra exclamation mark for good measure—using two exclamations is just enough to push something over the edge, enough to look off balanced, but three would be too much. She wants to send the right amount of recalcitrant bastard to her past self. And if she’s only got one log-in attempt before the laptop bricks, then, fine. Fuck you, GSTGSD Eleanor Shellstrop.

The little ball whirrs for a moment, before the screen flickers, the desktop loading in seconds.

**Author's Note:**

> okay complete truth: I was just trawling through my WIP folder and found this and was like, bitch you wrote this?? And I liked it but I have no memory of it, so here it as is. no idea if I'll continue. I strongly suspect I wrote this either as one of Michael's reboots or, more likely, as part of the Judge's test. If there's interest I'll continue it. I'm also cracking myself up but: I don't remember what GTSGSD was supposed to stand for so if you've a idea into past me's psyche, pls let me know lol


End file.
